The Theory of the Leisure Class is a book by Thorstein "Bunde" Veblen. It isn't very good. It has one good idea - conspicuous consumption1 - but spins that out into page after page of turgid Marxist-tinged prose6. Read it for yourself, here, if you dare. I started off reading carefully; about a third of the way through I became bored by the repetition; by two thirds I was skipping.One of the many things wrong with it is the title, which is a lie. "Leisure class" in the context of the Gilded Age brings to mind the idle rich but these, ostensibly at least, are not his subject; instead "The leisure class as a whole comprises the noble and the priestly classes2, together with much of their retinue. The occupations of the class are correspondingly diversified; but they have the common economic characteristic of being non-industrial. These non-industrial upper-class occupations may be roughly comprised under government, warfare, religious observances, and sports". So the leisure class actually has occupation, generally full-time. I think what he is doing here is using "Leisure class"" as a technical term quite different from its commonplace meaning, but relying on us to elide the two uses; but this is dishonest3; and he should just have written "non-industrial", or invented a term such as "class X".
The other thing wrong with the title - and much of the text - is the "class" element. I think it fits happily into his Marxist-type outlook, but really there's no need to bring class into this at all; his observation is simply that people like to signal status, and one way of doing that is to demonstrate their wealth, and one way to demonstrate wealth is conspicuous consumption: to consume pointlessly and visibly. I can't see any reason why this would be restricted to any particular class, even if there were any real class boundaries; although obvs it will be more obvious amongst those with money above the survival level. Fans of feminism won't be happy with his observation (recall we're back in 1899) that women, as the chattels of their husbands, are particularly suitable to consume conspicuously - by doing nothing useful - thereby vicariously consuming for their husbands; but this seems fair enough for the times. Fans of religion won't be happy with the idea that ministers of religion consume vicariously for their absent masters.
TV presents his work as a theory, or perhaps as a discussion, or an inquiry; but with my Popper hat on I wonder if it should be considered in any way a scientific theory? Is it testable; could it be falsified? I suspect not; I think it could perhaps join Freudian analysis or Marxism on Popper's list of anti-examples. Wiki quotes Mencken saying Do I enjoy a decent bath because I know that John Smith cannot afford one—or because I delight in being clean? Do I admire Beethoven's Fifth Symphony because it is incomprehensible to Congressmen and Methodists—or because I genuinely love music? Do I prefer terrapin à la Maryland to fried liver, because plowhands must put up with the liver—or because the terrapin is intrinsically a more charming dose? And this seems to be a problem for TV which I don't think he addresses: in many instances he has no particular criterion for distinguishing when a consumption is merely conspicuous, and it is hard to see how he could have. This seems related to the Puritan type idea that some things are necessary, and others not. Nonetheless I'm quite happy with his overall idea.
In the preface, he talks about the data employed in his argument, which makes me snort because there is no data. Indeed most of the text, page after page, remains resolutley abstract without even examples; but as to any actual data, it is entirely absent.
There are some minor oddities. For example: The duel is in substance a more or less deliberate resort to a fight as a final settlement of a difference of opinion. This is wrong: a duel is to settle points of honour. At one point he tries to explain women's fashion - he is fascinated by corsets - and correctly I think identifies it as signalling an inability to do any physical labour. He also tries to explain why each season sets new trends but his explanation does not convince. There is one, within his theory: that demonstrating you have the spare to allow devoting time to following the latest fashions demonstrates wealth; as does having the ability to aquire said fashion earlier than others.
I could do without the dodgy race-science elements; this doesn't seem to be necessary (his theory after all is quite generic8) and I didn't find the dolicho-blond stuff enlightening.
His schema7 has women-as-chattels as natural; towards the end he notices movements for female emancipation but does not seem sympathetic4: In a sense, then, the new-woman movement marks a reversion to a more generic type of human character, or to a less differentiated expression of human nature. It is a type of human nature which is to be characterized as proto-anthropoid, and, as regards the substance if not the form of its dominant traits, it belongs to a cultural stage that may be classed as possibly sub-human.
How much does all this apply today? CC amongst certain groups still exists, but I think in modified form. I don't think it applies much to me5 or those I know. Dressing well - dress is one of TV's few examples - is now available so readily that it doesn't form much of a signifier; I like the idea that luxury belief is now one of the marks. And he will certainly have to find himself some other class demarcation, now that "industrial" employment is so reduced.
Trivia: the idea of a Veblen Good, which is named for him, is nowhere mentioned.
Notes
1. I'm being somewhat lazy in giving wiki refs for all that; in these aspects I do not particularly recommend the wiki articles; I'm just using them to identify the concepts.
2. The book is full of language like that.
3. An idea taken up later by John "Justice as Fairness" Rawls.
4. To be fair, he has rather more to say than just this. To quote somewhat more sympathetically: But... futility of life or of expenditure is obnoxious... The impulse is perhaps stronger upon the woman than upon the man to live her own life in her own way and to enter the industrial process of the community at something nearer than the second remove.
5. But I would say that, wouldn't I? Perhaps blogging counts as a conspicuous display of spare time. We're back to the problem of how to you tell if an activity is CC or not.
6. See my witty para 3 on "Meritocratic" Sandel.
7. Not the CC idea; that is, in principle, entirely sex-agnostic. By "schema" I'm referring to his cod history of social development; characteristically this not only has no examples or data, it also employs his own terms to describe things, so you can't even tell what periods he is referring to.
8. Belatedly I recall to mention: at some point, that I cannot now be bothered to find, TV is critical of capitalism, because of the CC it encourages. But this is silly. CC is a generic feature of human nature driven by status seeking; the concept works in any system.
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